Cliffs of blue mirror glass plunge toward a waterfall, as space-age “hoverships” dock on glistening conical towers. Buildings shaped like spinning tops nestle among lush mountainsides, connected by ski slopes, while a glass bubble train snakes through the valley.
These could be scenes from a British science fiction Dan Dare comic, showing the vacation hideouts of the villainous Mekon and his chums. In fact, they are rare glimpses of how North Korean architects imagine their future.
“We gave them a completely open brief to dream up designs for what tourism might be like in their country,” said Beijing-based curator and tour operator Nick Bonner, who commissioned the paintings on show in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale — which won the Golden Lion for best pavilion.
“We asked them to go crazy, to see what they would come up with, given absolutely no constraints,” he said.
One scene shows plans for the Silk Cooperative, a high-tech, low-energy artisans’ commune, with circular buildings modeled on traditional Korean spinning wheels and wrapped in blue solar panels. Among the mirrored discs stand towers topped with wind-turbines-cum-helipads above a watery landscape.
“The tourist benefits from being in the company of artisans, and the ability to learn new skills or just indulge in the beauty of the area,” write the architects. “They can travel by river, solar-train, or helicopter, then go on mountain walks.”
It is a lavish dream in a country where transport is still limited and freedom of movement severely restricted. Despite the high-tech appearance of this new community, its architects are also keen to point out that the construction “uses natural stone, not concrete” — a strange claim, explained only by the fact that North Korea has yet to embrace reinforced steel.
Oozing retro Jetsons glamor and sprinkled with curious anachronisms, the paintings provide a fascinating window on what contemporary architectural culture looks like in a place cut off from the world since 1948, a land immune to the churning feedback loop of design blogs and glossy magazines. It is a quaint vision of a future that never happened, employing forms and materials that smack of World Fairs gone by, or Thunderbirds sets.
There are swaths of blue mirrors and bubble cable-cars, interiors lined with tangerine paint and brown veneer, all drenched in a decidedly 1970s flavor. There is a pink boudoir worthy of the Thunderbirds’ Lady Penelope, with a swooping ceiling and a molded side table — on which an old-fashioned rotary telephone sits.
The aesthetic is as if Bjarke Ingels had traveled in time to work as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright: sci-fi cartoons inflected with a homely crafts sensibility.
There are also underlying hints of the social values of North Korea and the juche ideology of collective self-reliance established by former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. The Bird’s Nest Villa is designed as a communal retreat, a cluster of interconnected pagodas for group holidays and corporate team-bonding trips.
“We all are in the nest together and have to learn to be together harmoniously,” say the architects, adding how the open interiors are “light, airy and fun.”
The rooms are arranged around staggered atriums, “to allow you to come into visual contact with your friends much more naturally, which aids communication,” they say.
In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, collective conviviality trumps solitude.
Elsewhere there is the Woodland Retreat, “an aerial hotel room where you are embraced by nature,” via a series of terraces on chunky columns — again hinting at the limits of North Korean structural possibility.
Other designs are eerily prescient. There is a great bridge that mysteriously conflates two Norman Foster projects — neither of which the architect would have seen — channeling the slender cable-stayed structure of the Millau Viaduct in southern France and the jaunty wobble of central London’s Millennium Bridge.
“Visitors walk across the morning mist as if on clouds connecting mountains, experiencing the feeling of flight,” says the blurb, describing “a different kind of experience using modern construction material. There is slight vibration and sway — like the Korean swing — so you know you are in the air.”
The paintings are a rare commission to have emerged from the country, the result of four years’ work by Bonner and his team.
They have been produced by architects at the Paekdusan Construction and Architectural Research Institute, an anonymous machine from which most of the state’s major projects are issued, by people trained at the country’s main architecture school, the Pyongyang Construction and Building Material University. It is a place where architects are weaned not on Corb and Koolhaas or Mies and Morphosis, but on a diet of ancient Korean buildings and socialist architecture with a North Korean influence, alongside classes in Western classical architecture and proportion — and declarations from former “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-il.
“There cannot and should not be a modern form of architecture that is devoid of national characteristics,” he wrote in a 1991 treatise, On Architecture, a 170-page guidebook-manifesto full of mangled aphorisms and strangely familiar architectural jargon.
“Architecture that has been created to reflect the people’s requirements in a new age, in keeping with modern aesthetic feelings and modern civilized life is architecture that embodies modernity, namely, modern architecture,” he wrote.
Elsewhere, he appears to draw on the Vitruvian triad of “firmness, commodity and delight,” declaring the four demands of the masses to be “convenience, cosiness, beauty and durability” — although it is hard to say that many of the megalithic monuments over which he presided look all that cozy.
So would he have approved of the buildings imagined here? Given the hypocrisy of his treatise, it is hard to tell. In one breath, he argues for the importance of originality, before summoning words that could come straight from British Prince Charles’ personal architectural manifesto: “We must combat and promptly do away with fame-seeking, formalism, art for art’s sake, imitationism and all the other unhealthy creative attitudes that find expression among architects.”
Regardless, given that Pyongyang sports a reportedly finished rocket-ship hotel, it can only be a matter of time before inhabited spinning wheels and high-tech treehouses become reality.
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